The Original Affluent Society
-by Marshall Sahlins
Hunter-gatherers
Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of
human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was
none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily
satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the
present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited
wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times.
There are two possible courses to affluence. Wants may be "easily satisfied" either by
producing much or desiring little The familiar conception, the Galbraithean waybased on the concept of market economies- states that man's wants are great, not to
say infinite, whereas his means are limited, although they can be improved. Thus, the
gap between means and ends can be narrowed by industrial productivity, at least to
the point that "urgent goods" become plentiful. But there is also a Zen road to
affluence, which states that human material wants are finite and few, and technical
means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting the Zen strategy, a people
can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty - with a low standard of living. That, I
think, describes the hunters. And it helps explain some of their more curious
economic behaviour: their "prodigality" for example- the inclination to consume at
once all stocks on hand, as if they had it made. Free from market obsessions of
scarcity, hunters' economic propensities may be more consistently predicated on
abundance than our own.
Destutt de Tracy, "fish-blooded bourgeois doctrinaire" though he might have been, at
least forced Marx to agree that "in poor nations the people are comfortable", whereas
in rich nations, "they are generally poor".
Sources of the Misconception
"Mere subsistence economy", "limited leisure save in
exceptional circumstances", incessant quest for
food", "meagre and relatively unreliable" natural
resources, "absence of an economic surplus",
"maximum energy from a maximum number of
people" so runs the fair average anthropological
opinion of hunting and gathering
The traditional dismal view of the hunters' fix goes
back to the time Adam Smith was writing, and
probably to a time before anyone was writing.
Probably it was one of the first distinctly neolithic
prejudices, an ideological appreciation of the
hunter's capacity to exploit the earth's resources
most congenial to the historic task of depriving him
of the same. We must have inherited it with the seed
of Jacob, which "spread abroad to the west, and to
the east, and to the north", to the disadvantage of
Esau who was the elder son and cunning hunter, but in a famous scene deprived of his
birthright.
Current low opinions of the hunting-gathering economy need not be laid to neolithic
ethnocentrism. Bourgeois ethnocentrism will do as well. The existing business
economy Will promote the same dim conclusions about the hunting life. Is it so
paradoxical to contend that hunters have affluent economies, their absolute poverty
notwithstanding? Modern capitalist societies, however richly endowed, dedicate
themselves to the proposition of scarcity. Inadequacy of economic means is the first
principle of the world's wealthiest peoples.
The market-industrial system institutes scarcity, in a manner completely without
parallel. Where production and distribution are arranged through the behaviour of
prices, and all livelihoods depend on getting and spending, insufficiency of material
means becomes the explicit, calculable starting point of all economic activity.
The entrepreneur is confronted with alternative investments of a finite capital, the
worker (hopefully) with alternative choices of remunerative employ, and the
consumer... Consumption is a double tragedy: what begins in inadequacy will end in
deprivation. Bringing together an international division of labour, the market makes
available a dazzling array of products: all these Good Things within a man's reach- but
never all within his grasp. Worse, in this game of consumer free choice, every
acquisition is simultaneously a deprivation for every purchase of something is a
foregoing of something else, in general only marginally less desirable, and in some
particulars more desirable, that could have been had instead. That sentence of "life
at hard labour" was passed uniquely upon us. Scarcity is the judgment decreed by our
economy. And it is precisely from this anxious vantage that we look back upon
hunters. But if modern man, with all his technological advantages, still lacks the
wherewithal, what chance has the naked savage with his puny bow and arrow? Having
equipped the hunter with bourgeois impulses and palaeolithic tools, we judge his
situation hopeless in advance.
Yet scarcity is not an intrinsic property of technical means. It is a relation between
means and ends. We should entertain the empirical possibility that hunters are in
business for their health, a finite objective, and that bow and arrow are adequate to
that end.
The anthropological disposition to exaggerate the economic inefficiency of hunters
appears notably by way of invidious comparison with neolithic economies. Hunters, as
Lowie (1) put it blankly, "must work much harder in order to live than tillers and
breeders" (p. 13). On this point evolutionary anthropology in particular found it
congenial, even necessary theoretically, to adopt the usual tone of reproach.
Ethnologists and archaeologists had become neolithic revolutionaries, and in their
enthusiasm for the Revolution spared nothing in denouncing the Old (Stone Age)
Regime. It was not the first time philosophers would relegate the earliest stage of
humanity rather to nature than to culture. ("A man who spends his whole life
following animals just to kill them to eat, or moving from one berry patch to another,
is really living just like an animal himself"(2) (p.122). The hunters thus downgraded,
anthropology was freer to extol the Neolithic Great Leap Forward: a main
technological advance that brought about a "general availability of leisure through
release from purely food-getting pursuits".(3) In an influential essay on "Energy and
the Evolution of Culture", Leslie White (5, 6) explained that the neolithic generated a
"great advance in cultural development... as a consequence of the great increase in
the amount of energy harnessed and controlled per capita per year by means of the
agricultural and pastoral arts". White further heightened the evolutionary contrast by
specifying human effort as the principal energy source of palaeolithic culture, as
opposed to the domesticated plant and animal resources of neolithic culture. This
determination of the energy sources at once permitted a precise low estimate of
hunters' thermodynamic potential- that developed by the human body: "average
power resources" of one twentieth horse power per capita -even as, by eliminating
human effort from the cultural enterprise of the neolithic, it appeared that people
had been liberated by some labour-saving device (domesticated plants and animals).
But White's problematic is obviously misconceived. The principal mechanical energy
available to both palaeolithic and neolithic culture is that supplied by human beings,
as transformed in both cases from plant and animal source, so that, with negligible
exceptions (the occasional direct use of non-human power), the amount of energy
harnessed per capita per year is the same in palaeolithic and neolithic economies- and
fairly constant in human history until the advent of the
industrial revolution.(5)
Marvelously varied diet
Marginal as the Australian or Kalahari desert is to
agriculture, or to everyday European experience, it is a
source of wonder to the untutored observer "how
anybody could live in a place like this". The inference
that the natives manage only to eke out a bare
existence is apt to be reinforced by their marvelously
varied diets. Ordinarily including objects deemed
repulsive and inedible by Europeans, the local cuisine
lends itself to the supposition that the people are
starving to death.
It is a mistake, Sir George Grey (7) wrote, to suppose
that the native Australians "have small means of
subsistence, or are at times greatly pressed for want of
food". Many and "almost ludicrous" are the errors
travellers have fallen into in this regard: "They lament
in their journals that the unfortunate Aborigines should
be reduced by famine to the miserable necessity of
subsisting on certain sorts of food, which they have
found near their huts; whereas, in many instances, the
articles thus quoted by them are those which the
natives most prize, and are really neither deficient in
flavour nor nutritious qualities". To render palpable
"the ignorance that has prevailed with regard to the
habits and customs of this people when in their wild
state", Grey provides one remarkable example, a
citation from his fellow explorer, Captain Stuart, who,
upon encountering a group of Aboriginals engaged in
gathering large quantities of mimosa gum, deduced
that the "unfortunate creatures were reduced to the
last extremity, and, being unable to procure any other
nourishment, had been obliged to collect this
mucilaginous". But, Sir George observes, the gum in
question is a favourite article of food in the area, and
when in season it affords the opportunity for large
numbers of people to assemble and camp together,
which otherwise they are unable to do. He concludes:
"Generally speaking, the natives live well; in some
districts there may be at particular seasons of the year
a deficiency of food, but if such is the case, these tracts are, at those times,
deserted.
It is, however, utterly impossible for a traveller or even for a strange native to judge.
whether a district affords an abundance Of food, or the contrary... But in his own
district a native is very differently situated; he knows exactly what it produces, the
proper time at which the several articles are in season, and the readiest means of
procuring them. According to these circumstances he regulates his visits to different
portions of his hunting ground; and I can only say that l have always found the
greatest abundance in their huts."(8)
In making this happy assessment, Sir George took special care to exclude the lumpenproletariat aboriginals living in and about European towns -The exception instructive.
It evokes a second source of ethnographic misconceptions: the anthropology of
hunters is largely an anachronistic study of ex-savages an inquest into the corpse of
one society, Grey once said, presided over by members of another.
"A Kind of Material Plenty"
Considering the poverty in which hunters and gatherers live in theory, it comes as a
surprise that Bushmen who live in the Kalahari enjoy "a kind of material plenty", at
least in the realm of everyday useful things, apart from food and water:
"As the !Kung come into more contact with Europeans and this is already happening they will feel sharply the lack of our things and will need and want more. It makes
them feel inferior to be without clothes when they stand among strangers who are
clothed. But in their own life and with their own artifacts they were comparatively
free from material pressures. Except for food and water (important exceptions!) of
which the Nyae Nyae Kung have a sufficiency - but barely so, judging from the fact
that all are thin though not emaciated - they all had what they needed or could make
what they needed, for every man can and does make the things that men make and
every woman the things that women make... They lived in a kind of material plenty
because they adapted the tools of their living to materials which lay in abundance
around them and which were free for anyone to take (wood, reeds, bone for weapons
and implements, fibres for cordage, grass for shelters). or to materials which were at
least sufficient for the needs of the population.... The !Kung could always use more
ostrich egg shells for beads to wear or trade with, but, as it is, enough are found for
every woman to have a dozen or more shells for water containers all she can carry and a goodly number of bead ornaments. In their nomadic hunting-gathering life,
travelling from one source Of food to another through the seasons, always going back
and forth between food and water, they carry their young children and their
belongings. With plenty of most materials at hand to replace artifacts as required, the
!Kung have not developed means of permanent storage and have not needed or
wanted to encumber. themselves with surpluses or duplicates. They do not even want
to carry one of everything. They borrow what they do not own. With this ease, they
have not hoarded, and the accumulation of objects has not become associated with
status.."(9)
In the non subsistence sphere, the people's wants are generally easily satisfied. Such
"material plenty" depends partly upon the simplicity of technology and democracy of
pro perty. Products are homespun: of stone, bone, wood, skin-materials such as "lay
in abundance around them". As a rule, neither extraction of the raw material nor its
working up take strenuous effort. Access to natural resources is typically direct- "free
for anyone to take"- even as possession of the necessary tools is general and
knowledge of the required skills common. The division of labour is likewise simple,
predominantly a division of labour by sex. Add in the liberal customs of sharing, for
which hunters are properly famous, and all the people can usually participate in the
going prosperity, such as it is.
For most hunters, such affluence without abundance in the non-subsistence sphere
need not be long debated. A more interesting question is why they are content with
so few possessions for it is with them a policy, a "matter of principle" as Gusinde 10
says, and not a misfortune.
But are hunters so undemanding of material goods because they are themselves
enslaved by a food quest "demanding maximum energy from a maximum number of
people", so that no time or effort remains for the provision of other comforts? Some
ethnographers testify to the contrary that the food quest is so successful that half the
time the people seem not to know what to do with themselves. On the other hand,
movement is a condition of this success, more movement in some cases than others,
but always enough to rapidly depreciate the satisfactions of property. Of the hunter it
is truly said that his wealth is a burden. In his condition of life, goods can become
"grievously oppressive", as Gusinde observes, and the more so the longer they are
carried around. Certain food collectors do have canoes and a few have dog sleds, but
most must carry themselves all the comforts they possess, and so only possess what
they can comfortably carry themselves. Or perhaps only what the women can carry:
the men are often left free to reach to the sudden opportunity of the chase or the
sudden necessity of defence. As Owen Lattimore wrote in a not too different context,
"the pure nomad is the poor nomad". Mobility and property are in contradiction. That
wealth quickly becomes more of an encumbrance than a good thing is apparent even
to the outsider. Laurens van der Post (11) was caught in the contradiction as he
prepared to make farewells to his wild Bushmen friends:
"This matter of presents gave us many an anxious moment. We were humiliated by the
realisation of how little there was we could give to the Bushmen. Almost everything
seemed likely to make life more difficult for them by adding to the litter and weight
of their daily round. They themselves had practically no possessions: a loin strap, a
skin blanket and a leather satchel. There was nothing that they could not assemble in
one minute, wrap up in their blankets and carry on their shoulders for a journey of a
thousand miles. They had no sense of possession."
Here then is another economic "peculiarity"- some hunters at least, display a notable
tendency to be sloppy about their possessions. They have the kind of nonchalance
that would be appropriate to a people who have mastered the problems of
production.
"They do not know how to take care of their belongings. No one dreams of putting
them in order, folding them, drying or cleaning them, hanging them up, or putting
them in a neat pile. If they are looking for some particular thing, they rummage
carelessly through the hodgepodge of trifles in the little baskets. Larger objects that
are piled up in a heap in the hut are dragged hither and thither with no regard for the
damage that might be done them.
The European observer has the impression that these (Yahgan) Indians place no value
whatever on their utensils and that they have completely forgotten the effort it took
to make them. Actually, no one clings to his few goods and chattels which, as it is,
are often and easily lost, but just as easily replaced... The Indian does not even
exercise care when he could conveniently do so. A European is likely to shake his head
at the boundless indifference of these people who drag brand-new objects, precious
clothing, fresh provisions and valuable items through thick mud, or abandon them to
their swift destruction by children and dogs.... Expensive things that are given them
are treasured for a few hours, out of curiosity; after that they thoughtlessly let
everything deteriorate in the mud and wet. The less they own, the more comfortable
they can travel, and what is ruined they occasionally replace. Hence, they are
completely indifferent to any material possessions."(10)
The hunter, one is tempted to say, is "uneconomic man". At least as concerns non
subsistence goods, he is the reverse of that standard caricature immortalised in any
General Principles of Economics, page one. His wants are scarce and his means (in
relation) plentiful. Consequently he is "comparatively free of material pressures", has
"no sense of possession", shows "an undeveloped sense of property", is "completely
indifferent to any material pressures", manifests a "lack of interest" in developing his
technological equipment.
In this relation of hunters to worldly goods there is a neat and important point. From
the internal perspective of the economy, it seems wrong to say that wants are
"restricted", desires "restrained", or even that the notion of wealth is "limited". Such
phrasings imply in advance an Economic Man and a struggle of the hunter against his
own worse nature, which is finally then subdued by a cultural vow of poverty. The
words imply the renunciation of an acquisitiveness that in reality was never
developed, a suppression of desires that were never broached. Economic Man is a
bourgeois construction- as Marcel Mauss said, "not behind us, but before, like the
moral man". It is not that hunters and gatherers have curbed their materialistic
"impulses"; they simply never made an institution of them. "Moreover, if it is a great
blessing to be free from a great evil, our (Montagnais) Savages are happy; for the two
tyrants who provide hell and torture for many of our Europeans, do not reign in their
great forests, I mean ambition and avarice... as they are contented with a mere
living, not one of them gives himself to the Devil to acquire wealth."(12)
Subsistence
When Herskovits (13) was writing his Economic Anthropology (1958), it was common
anthropological practice to take the Bushmen or the native Australians as "a classic
illustration; of a people whose economic resources are of the scantiest", so
precariously situated that "only the most intense application makes survival possible".
Today the "classic" understanding can be fairly reversed- on evidence largely from
these two groups. A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than
we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure
abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year
than in any other condition of society.
The most obvious, immediate conclusion is that the people do not work hard. The
average length of time per person per day put into the appropriation and preparation
of food was four or five hours. Moreover, they do not work continuously. The
subsistence quest was highly intermittent. It would stop for the time being when the
people had procured enough for the time being. which left them plenty of time to
spare. Clearly in subsistence as in other sectors of production, we have to do with an
economy of specific, limited objectives. By hunting and gathering these objectives
are apt to be irregularly accomplished, so the work pattern becomes correspondingly
erratic.
As for the Bushmen, economically likened to Australian hunters by Herskovits, two
excellent recent reports by Richard Lee show their condition to be indeed the same
14 16 Lee's research merits a special hearing not only because it concerns Bushmen,
but specifically the Dobe section of Kung Bushmen, adjacent to the Nyae about whose
subsistence- in a context otherwise of "material plenty"- Mrs Marshall expressed
important reservations. The Dobe occupy an area of Botswana where !Kung Bushmen
have been living for at least a hundred years, but have only just begun to suffer
dislocation pressures.
Abundance
Despite a low annual rainfall (6 to 10 inches), Lee found in the Dobe area a "surprising
abundance of vegetation". Food resources were "both varied and abundant",
particularly the energy rich mangetti nut- "so abundant that millions of the nuts
rotted on the ground each year for want of picking".15 The Bushman figures imply
that one man's labour in hunting and gathering will support four or five people. Taken
at face value, Bushman food collecting is more efficient than French farming in the
period up to World War II, when more than 20 per cent of the population were
engaged in feeding the rest. Confessedly, the comparison is misleading, but not as
misleading as it is astonishing. In the total population of free-ranging Bushmen
contacted by Lee, 61.3 per cent (152 of 248) were effective food producers; the
remainder were too young or too old to contribute importantly In the particular camp
under scrutiny, 65 per cent were "effectives". Thus the ratio of food producers to the
general population is actually 3 :5 or 2:3. But, these 65 per cent of the people
"worked 36 per cent of the time, and 35 per cent of the people did not work at all"!
(15)
For each adult worker, this comes to about two and one - half days labour per week.
(In other words, each productive individual supported herself or himself and
dependents and still had 3 to 5 days available for other activities.) A "day's work" was
about six hours; hence the Dobe work week is approximately 15 hours, or an average
of 2 hours 9 minutes per day. All things considered, Bushmen subsistence labours are
probably very close to those of native Australians.
Also like the Australians, the time Bushmen do not work in subsistence they pass in
leisure or leisurely activity. One detects again that characteristic palaeolithic rhythm
of a day or two on, a day or two off- the latter passed desultorily in camp. Although
food collecting is the primary productive activity, Lee writes, "the majority of the
people's time (four to five days per week) is spent in other pursuits, such as resting in
camp or visiting other camps" (15):
"A woman gathers on one day enough food to feed her family for three days, and
spends the rest of her time resting in camp, doing embroidery, visiting other camps,
or entertaining;n; visitors from other camps. For each day at home, kitchen routines,
such as cooking, nut cracking, collecting firewood, and fetching water, occupy one to
three hours of her time. This rhythm of steady work and steady leisure maintained
throughout the year. The hunters tend to work more frequently than the women, but
their schedule uneven. It 'not unusual' for a man to hunt avidly for a week and then do
no hunting at all for two or three weeks. Since hunting is an unpredictable business
and su bject to magical control, hunters sometimes experience a run of bad luck and
stop hunting for a month or longer. During these periods, visiting, entertaining, and
especially dancing are the primary activities of men.(16)"
The daily per-capita subsistence yield for the Dobe Bushmen was 2,140 calories.
However, taking into account body weight, normal activities, and the age-sex
composition of the Dobe population, Lee estimates the people require only 1,975
calories per capita. Some of the surplus food probably went to the dogs, who ate
what the people left over. "The conclusion can be drawn that the Bushmen do not
lead a substandard existence on the edge of starvation as has been commonly
supposed."(15)
Meanwhile, back in Africa the Hadza have been long enjoying a comparable ease, with
a burden of subsistence occupations no more strenuous in hours per day than the
Bushmen or the Australian Aboriginals.16 Living in an area of "exceptional abundance"
of animals and regular supplies of vegetables (the vicinity of Lake Eyasi), Hadza men
seem much more concerned with games of chance than with chances of game. During
the long dry season especially, they pass the greater part of days on end in gambling,
perhaps only to lose the metal-tipped arrows they need for big game hunting at other
times. In any case, many men are "quite unprepared or unable to hunt big game even
when they possess the necessary arrows". Only a small minority, Woodburn writes, are
active hunters of large animals, and if women are generally more assiduous at their
vegetable collecting, still it is at a leisurely pace and without prolonged labour.(17)
Despite this nonchalance, and an only limited economic cooperation, Hadza
"nonetheless obtain sufficient food without undue effort". Woodburn offers this "very
rough approximation" of subsistence-labour requirements: "Over the year as a whole
probably an average of less than two hours a day spent obtaining food" (Woodburn.16)
Interesting that the Hazda, tutored by life and not by anthropology, reject the
neolithic revolution in order to keep their leisure. Although surrounded by cultivators,
they have until recently refused to take up agriculture themselves, "mainly on the
grounds that this would involve too much hard work". In this they are like the
Bushmen, who respond to the neolithic question with another: "Why should we plant,
when there are so many mongomongo nuts m the world?" (14) Woodburn moreover did
form the impression, although as yet unsubstantiated, that Hadza actually expend less
energy, and probably less time, obtaining subsistence than do neighbouring cultivators
of East Africa. (16) To change continents but not contents, the fitful economic
commitment of the South American hunter, too, could seem to the European outsider
an incurable "natural disposition":
"... the Yamana are not capable of continuous, daily hard labour, much to the chagrin
of European farmers and employers for whom they often work. Their work is more a
matter of fits and starts, and in these occasional efforts they can develop
considerable energy for a certain time. After that, however, they show a desire for an
incalculably long rest period during which they lie about doing nothing, without
showing great fatigue.... It is obvious that repeated irregularities of this kind make
the European employer despair, but the Indian cannot help it. It is his natural
disposition." (10)
The hunter's attitude towards farming introduces us, lastly, to a few particulars of the
way they relate to the food quest. Once again we venture here into the internal realm
of the economy, a realm sometimes subjective and always difficult to understand;
where, moreover, hunters seem deliberately inclined to overtax our comprehension
by customs so odd as to invite the extreme interpretation that either these people are
fools or they really have nothing to worry about. The former would be a true logical
deduction from the hunter's nonchalance, on the premise that his economic condition
is truly exigent. On the other hand, if a livelihood is usually easily procured, if one
can usually expect to succeed, then the people's seeming imprudence can no longer
appear as such. Speaking to unique developments of the market economy, to its
institutionalisation of scarcity, Karl Polanyi (18) said that our "animal dependence
upon food has been bared and the naked fear of starvation permitted to run loose.
Our humiliating enslavement to the material, which all human culture is designed to
mitigate, was deliberately made more rigorous" But our problems are not theirs.
Rather, a pristine affluence colours their economic arrangements, a trust in the
abundance of nature's resources rather than despair at the inadequacy of human
means. My point is that otherwise curious heathen devices become understandable by
the people's confidence, a confidence which is the reasonable human attribute of a
generally successful economy.
A more serious issue is presented by the frequent and exasperated observation of a
certain "lack of foresight" among hunters and gatherers. Orientated forever in the
present, without "the slightest thought of, or care for, what the morrow may bring",
(19) the hunter seems unwilling to husband supplies, incapable of a planned response
to the doom surely awaiting him. He adopts instead a studied unconcern, which
expresses itself in two complementary economic inclinations.
The first, prodigality: the propensity to eat right through all the food in the camp,
even during objectively difficult times, "as if", Lillian said of the Montagnais, "the
game they were to hunt was shut up in a stable". Basedow (20) wrote of native
Australians, their motto "might be interpreted in words to the effect that while there
is plenty for today never care about tomorrow. On this account an Aboriginal inclined
to make one feast of his supplies, in preference to a modest meal now and another by
and by." Le Jeune even saw his Montagnais carry such extravagance to the edge of
disaster.
"In the famine through which we passed, if my host took two, three, or four Beavers,
immediately, whether it was day or night, they had a feast for all neighbouring
Savages. And if those People had captured something, they had one also at the same
time; so that, on emerging from one feast, you went to another, and sometimes even
to a third and a fourth. I told them that they did not manage well, and that it would
be better to reserve these feasts for future days, and in doing this they would not be
so pressed with hunger. They laughed at me. 'Tomorrow' (they said) 'we shall make
another feast with what we shall capture.' Yes, but more often they capture only cold
and wind." (12)
A second and complementary inclination is merely prodigality's negative side: the
failure to put by food surpluses, to develop food storage. For many hunters and
gatherers, it appears, food storage cannot be proved technically impossible, nor is it
certain that the people are unaware of the possibility. (18) One must investigate
instead what in the situation precludes the attempt. Gusinde asked this question, and
for the Yahgan found the answer in the self same justifiable optimism. Storage would
be "superfluous", "because through the entire year and with almost limitless
generosity the she puts all kinds of animals at the disposal of the man who hunts and
the woman who gathers. Storm or accident will deprive a family of these things for no
more than a few days. Generally no one need reckon with the danger of hunger, and
everyone almost any where finds an abundance of what he needs. Why then should
anyone worry about food for the future... Basically our Fuegians know that they need
not fear for the future, hence they do not pile up supplies. Year in and year out they
can look forward to the next day, free of care...." (12)
Gusinde's explanation is probably good as far as it goes, but probably incomplete. A
more complex and subtle economic calculus seems in play. In fact one must consider
the advantages of food storage against the diminishing returns to collection within a
confined locale. An uncontrollable tendency to lower the local carrying capacity is for
hunters au fond des choses: a basic condition of their production and main cause of
their movement. The potential drawback of storage is exactly that it engages the
contradiction between wealth and mobility. It would anchor the camp to an area soon
depleted of natural food supplies. Thus immobilised by their accumulated stocks, the
people may suffer by comparison with a little hunting and gathering elsewhere, where
nature has, so to speak, done considerable storage of her own-of foods possibly more
desirable in diversity as well as amount than men can put by. As it works out, an
attempt to stock up food may only reduce the overall output of a hunting band, for
the havenots will content themselves with stay- ing in camp and living off !he
wherewithal amassed by the more prudent. Food storage, then, may be technically
feasible, yet economically undesirable, and socially unachievable.
What are the real handicaps of the hunting-gathering praxis? Not "low productivity of
labour", if existing examples mean anything. But the economy is seriously" afflicted by
the imminence of diminishing returns. Beginning in subsistence and spreading from
there to every sector, an initial success seems only to develop the probability that
further efforts will yield smaller benefits. This describes the typical curve of foodgetting within a particular locale. A modest number of people usually sooner than
later reduce the food resources within convenient range of camp. Thereafter, they
may stay on only by absorbing an increase in real costs or a decline in real returns:
rise in costs if the people choose to search farther and farther afield, decline in
returns if they are satisfied to live on the shorter supply or inferior foods in easier
reach. The solution, of course, is to go somewhere else. Thus the first and decisive
contingency of hunting-gathering: it requires movement to maintain production on
advantageous terms.
But this movement, more or less frequent in different circumstances, more or less
distant. merely transposes to other spheres of production the same diminishing
returns of which it is born. The manufacture of tools, clothing, utensils, or
ornaments, how- ever easily done, becomes senseless when these begin to be more of
a burden than a comfort Utility falls quickly at the margin of portability. The
construction of substantial houses likewise becomes absurd if they must soon be
abandoned. Hence the hunter's very ascetic conceptions of material welfare: an
interest only in minimal equipment, "if that; a valuation of smaller things over bigger;
a disinterest in acquiring two or more of most goods; and the like. Ecological pressure
assumes a rare form of concreteness when it has to be shouldered. If the gross
product is trimmed down in comparison with other economies, it is not the hunter's
productivity that is at fault, but his mobility.
Demographic constraints
Almost the same thing can be said of the demographic constraints of huntinggathering. The same policy of debarassment is in play on the level of people,
describable in similar terms and ascribable to similar causes. The terms are, coldbloodedly: diminishing returns at the margin of portability, minimum necessary
equipment, elimination of duplicates, and so forth-that is to say, infanticide.
senilicide, sexual continence for the duration of the nursing period, etc., practices for
which many food-collecting peoples are well known. The presumption that such
devices are due to an inability to support more people is probably true-if' "support" is
understood in the sense of carrying them rather than feeding them. The people
eliminated, as hunters sometimes sadly' tell, are precisely those who cannot
effectively transport themselves, who would I hinder the movement of family and
camp. Hunters may be obliged to handle people and goods in parallel ways, the
draconic population policy an expression of the same ecology as the ascetic economy.
Hunting and gathering has all the strengths of its weaknesses. Periodic movement and
restraint in wealth and adaptations, the kinds of necessities of the economic practice
and creative adaptations the kinds of necessities of which virtues are made. Precisely
in such a framework, affluence becomes possible. Mobility and moderation put
hunters' ends within range of their technical means. An undeveloped mode of
production is thus rendered highly effective. The hunter's life is not as difficult as it
looks from the outside. In some ways the economy reflects dire ecology, but it is also
a complete inversion.
Three to five hour working
day
Reports on hunters and gatherers of the
ethnological present-specifically on those
in marginal environments suggest a mean
of three to five hours per adult worker
per day in food production. Hunters keep
banker's hours, notably less than modern
industrial workers (unionised), who would
surely settle for a 21-35 hour week. An
interesting comparison is also posed by
recent studies of labour costs among
agriculturalists of neolithic type. For
example, the average adult Hanunoo, man
or woman, spends 1,200 hours per year in
swidden cultivation;21 which is to say, a
mean of three hours twenty minutes per
day. Yet this figure does not include food
gathering, animal raising, cooking and
other direct subsistence efforts of these
Philippine tribesmen. Comparable data
are beginning to appear in reports on other primitive agriculturalists from many parts
of the world.
There is nothing either to the convention that hunters and gatherers can enjoy little
leisure from tasks of sheer survival. By this, the evolutionary inadequacies of the
palaeolithic are customarily explained, while for the provision of leisure the neolithic
is roundly congratulated. But the traditional formulas might be truer if reversed: the
amount of work (per capita) increases with the evolution of culture, and the amount
of leisure decreases. Hunter's subsistence labours are characteristically intermittent,
a day on and a day off, and modern hunters at least tend to employ their time off in
such activities as daytime sleep. In the tropical habitats occupied by many of these
existing hunters, plant collecting is more reliable than hunting itself. Therefore, the
women, who do the collecting, work rather more regularly than the men, and provide
the greater part of the food supply.
In alleging this is an affluent economy, therefore, I do not deny that certain hunters
have moments of difficulty. Some do find it "almost inconceivable" for a man to die of
hunger, or even to fail to satisfy his hunger for more than a day or two.16 But others,
especially certain very peripheral hunters spread out in small groups across an
environment of extremes, are exposed periodically to the kind of inclemency that
interdicts travel or access to game. They suffer although perhaps only fractionally,
the shortage affecting particular immobilised families rather than the society as a
whole. (10)
Still, granting this vulnerability, and allowing the most poorly situated modern
hunters into comparison. it would be difficult to prove that privation is distinctly
characteristic of the hunter-gatherers. Food shortage is not the indicative property of
this mode of production as opposed to others; it does not mark off hunters and
gatherers as a class or a general evolutionary stage. Lowie (22) asks:
"But what of the herders on a simple plane whose maintenance is periodically
jeopardised by plagues-who, like some Lapp bands of the nineteenth century were
obliged to fall back on fishing? What of the primitive peasants who clear and till
without compensation of the soil, exhaust one plot and pass on to the next, and are
threatened with famine at every drought? Are they any more in control of misfortune
caused by natural conditions than the hunter-gatherer?"
Above all. what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to
go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much
smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest
technical power, is starvation an in. situation. Reverse another venerable formula:
the amount of hunger in. creases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of
culture. This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of
circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and
given their adequate means of production. all the people's material wants usually can
be easily satisfied.
The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor.
Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means
and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such
it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious
distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can
render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter
camp of Alaskan Eskimo.
References
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York. Rinehart.
2. Braidwood, Robert J. 1957. Prehistoric Men. 3rd ed. Chicago Natural History
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(eds.), Man the Hunter. Chicago: Aldine.
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anthropological director, department of Anthropology, London School of Economics).
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Extract from stone-age Economics. By Marshall Sahlins